Unforgiven

The Course of Empire

Clint Eastwood and an elegy to a dying genre, a lost frontier.

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day:
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

George Berkeley, 1726

And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a
hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and
with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance
of the Frontier in American History, 1893

There is a page, in William C. Davis’ book The
American Frontier,
with a photograph of two Native Americans in full dress playing ping-pong
in front of a small group of cowboys and Indians, all likely on their day
off. This was part of the cast of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and
the year was 1902. “By then,” the text reads, “most people
knew the score.” Indeed.

Following his death, Abraham Lincoln had been carted around the
country in a special railway compartment named for him by the Union Pacific
Railroad company. Before being laid to rest, his corpse was trotted from
city to city so that the bereft and the bereaved could pay tribute to the
man who had done so much for his country. It had been a sudden passing, in
1865.

There was something of the same memorial spirit, I think, behind Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West show and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The West
and the Western had both died abruptly, too. Yet Unforgiven lives
on. Fifteen years on, its power has not diminished, but increased with age.
It has not mellowed, but ripened.

Unforgiven is a movie about endings. An autumnal movie. If the
Western, as the actor Robert Duvall says, is “our story,” our
national mythology, then discussing Unforgiven may help us understand
ourselves. The Western genre “died” a century after the American
frontier did, but their passings reflect each other. Eastwood’s greatest
film is concerned about the dissolution of both.

I understand Unforgiven to be an Apocalypse Book along the lines
of St. John’s Revelation and kin also to the Buddhist Sutta Pitaka,
the Hindu Kali Yuga, the Islamic account of the Day of Reckoning, or Judaism’s
acharit hayamim. The prime business of this movie is eschatology.

1.

Unforgiven is set in the 1880s; the story of William Munny (Eastwood),
once a vicious, violent killer made worse by whiskey. The plot is as follows:
A prostitute is cut up by cowboys in the whorehouse of Big Whiskey, Wyoming.
The town sheriff and strong man, Little Bill (Gene Hackman), goes soft on
the toughs and gives them a pittance of a whipping. He then releases them.
In response, the bordello pools its money and puts out a thousand-dollar
contract on the knifemen. This reward attracts the interest of the West’s
diminishing pool of gunfighters, notably English Bob (Richard Harris), a
rising star of the pulp magazines that have already begun to turn the Great
West from dying reality into living myth. The sole member of Bob’s
entourage consists of such an undertaker: his chronicler and publicist, a
Eastern scribbler named Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer of lurid paperback
Westerns with titles like The Duke of Death.

Neither Briton, book, nor bounty, sit well with Little Bill, who administers
to Bob the third of the several terrifying beatings administered during the
course of the film. In effect, Hackman’s character is dealing with
a fellow competitor in the field of gentrification; the Englishman’s
working-over comes from his violating two of Little Bill’s civilizing
rules; one written (no guns in town) and one unwritten (no “scum” or “bad
types”).

Little Bill’s laws present a rebuke to the West’s chief characteristic;
what the historian Turner called “the outer edge of the wave—the
meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Part of Turner’s
thesis was that the frontier was the pressure-valve in American society—where
people like William Munny could go: “As has been indicated, the frontier
is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness
into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is
anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct
control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.” Anti-social.
The Western movies of mid-century Hollywood seem eminently social, in retrospect.
What would the men of The Magnificent Seven say to such a professorial
rebuke?

But Unforgiven is a revisionist epic. So Munny has used this opportunity
to become a violent murderer and a lousy herder of swine; Little Bill uses
his rules as a mask for his psychopathy and power-hunger. In Eastwood’s
Wyoming, freedom’s made bad men; but civilization makes worse. Hackman’s
rule over Big Whiskey gets a dexterous metaphor of its own: Outside the settlement,
Little Bill is building, with his own hands, his dream house; a house where,
we are told, no angle is straight—“crooked timber,” truly.

Despite Bill’s throttling of English Bob, word gets out about the
reward, which brings The Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), braggart man-child,
to Munny’s door. Munny, we’re told in the prologue (reminiscent
of She Wore A Yellow Ribbon), was cured of drinking and wicked ways by his
wife, who died and left him with two children, three years before our story
begins. Having turned his back on violence, like the hero of Shane, he is
called to resume his craft.

After debating and assuring himself he’s no longer a “bad man” (“I’m
just a fella now.”)—a sentiment he will repeat ad
nauseam for
the rest of the film, trying to convince himself of something he knows not
to be true—he recruits his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and,
together with The Kid, go to Big Whiskey to discuss the reward. Freeman and
Woolvett visit the upstairs bordello, leaving Eastwood, shivering with rain
chills, alone in the first-story bar. Fever-ridden Munny, now apparently
a pacific man, is discovered to have a gun and is beaten up horribly by Little
Bill. Rescued, he has a vision of the Angel of Death and, after several days
near death, is healed and sewn up by Logan. Recuperated, Munny and company
pursue the cattlemen. With the elderly Logan now psychologically unable to
murder and The Kid too nearsighted, it falls upon Munny to kill the offender.
He does so. Logan leaves the group, vowing to meet Munny later; instead,
he is caught by Little Bill’s posse. Whipped by Bill for information,
he dies. Meanwhile, the Kid and Munny find the second cutter.

The Kid kills him; his subsequent emotional breakdown puts a lie to his
claims that he’s a “damn killer.” Munny begins drinking
again during these scenes. Meeting a prostitute with the reward outside Big
Whiskey, Munny and the Kid find out about Logan’s death and Little
Bill’s displaying of Ned’s body outside of Greeley’s tavern.
We then hear the full extent of Munny’s past; he’s killed many,
many people, including women and children. Eastwood, planning to seek vengeance,
orders the Kid to go home and begins to empty a whiskey bottle down his throat.

That evening, Munny, fully transfigured now into the Angel of Death of his
vision, rides into town in the rain on a pale horse and kills Little Bill
and five other men. Riding out, he warns the cowering townspeople to “give
Ned a decent burial” and not to “cut up any more whores” or
he’ll kill them all. A man with Munny in his gunsight is unable to
shoot. The movie then ends, with the epilogue suggesting that Munny and his
family went West to San Francisco, where “it was rumored he prospered
in dry goods.” We are left with the same shot of Munny’s house,
tree, and wife’s graveyard that opened the film.

What is this movie about?

2.

My thesis is this: I think most myths are incomplete without an ending.
Arthur goes to Avalon. Robin Hood shoots an arrow to mark his grave site.
Davy Crockett dies at the Alamo. Like Ragnarok was to Norse myth, Unforgiven is
to the Western; the “end myth.” It was made in 1992, long after
Americans had chosen Star Wars, sci-fi, action, and urban noir as
their preferred entertainments. It was Eastwood’s goodbye to the genre
that’d made him.

And because it’s the end of the Western, its subject matter was necessarily
an elegy on the West and simultaneously a “true history” of the
American frontier: nobody is what they seem; deception is everywhere; morality
is not black and white; killing scars you in every way; justice is either
too light or too extreme; the West was full not only of individualist pioneers,
but sociopaths; good men are sometimes bad men and vice versa. Demystification could
be the word for it; “revisionist”—already used above— is
another. Unforgiven is in part a fulfillment of the trend began
by movies like Shane, Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and,
to some extent,
High Noon and The Searchers. Impressive as that pedigree
is, however, Eastwood’s
movie has a self-consciousness none of its progenitors can match. Some of
the best speeches in the film come from Little Bill’s explanation to
the pulp writer Beauchamp of the way the West really was; no, not
that way, this way. Again, deception: Munny isn’t a farmer but a natural
killer; the Schofield Kid is a liar; Little Bill is a bully, English Bob
is a fraud who kills unarmed men.

“Where” is the film historically? Unforgiven is set in the weeks
and days before and after September 18, 1881 (the date President Garfield
died; we see the newspapers with this headline during the railway car scene).
Why? Because this is when the west died; as a famous author once put it: “when
they [historians] begin working on your biography, it’s like someone
chiseling your tombstone.” Two years later, in 1883, Buffalo Bill would
found his Wild West show, featuring real cowboys and Indians. 1883 was also
the year Civil War general William T. Sherman said “I now regard the
Indians as substantially eliminated from the problem of the army.” Almost
every Native American tribe—teeming an estimated 300,000 in 1845—had
been relocated to a reservation.

Eight years after that, on January 19, 1891, the whole Sioux nation—the
last true holdouts—surrendered formally to the United States, ending
400 years of off-and-on racial warfare. Other Plains inhabitants had fared
just as poorly; by 1890 there were an estimated 750 bison left alive, down
from an estimated herd of 60 to 100 million 40 years earlier. A year before
that, the 1890 bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census would report “Up
to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present
the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement
that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”

It was this report that inspired Turner’s paper. The fact was amazing.
The frontier had always been a fluid concept; initially, it was any land
more than 100 miles from the eastern seaboard. Jefferson Davis and Lincoln
were considered “Western men.” But what we think of today as
the true frontier, the “West,” the Wild West,
once called the “Great
Desert”—2.5 million square miles of wilderness, 700 miles of
plains and arid steppes, dominated by mountains that trumped the Alps—that West,
was done and finished in about 77 years: conquered by McCormick’s
horse-drawn reaper (patented 1834), Deere’s clod-breaking sleek steel
plow (c. 1837), and Morse’s telegraph (1844), but most of all by the
Transcontinental Railroad. When the last, gold spike was driven in on May
10, 1869 at Promontory, Utah, they had it hooked up with telegraph wires
so the hammered pulse could transmit its own news like a nervous shock to
both coasts. They might as well have sent an earthquake.

3.

It’s appropriate, in a way, that Lincoln serves as the opening to
this essay, for reasons other than the news of another murdered president
opens Unforgiven. 1865, after all, was also the year America’s vast
energies, no longer sapped by war, turned to the frontier. The martyr himself
had made it possible. Lincoln had signed the—literally—groundbreaking
Homestead Act on May 20, 1862, finishing a political effort that dated back
to 1844, partially the result of Horace “Go west, young man” Greeley.

The Homestead Act opened that West to white settlers—by the end of
century, some 600,000 farmers had received clear title to about 80 million
acres of public lands. Life in the middle of death—for this was the
postbellum age, as Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown
Decades: “Dead
men were everywhere. They were present in memory; their portraits stoically
gathered dust in empty parlours; they even retained possession of their bodies
and walked about the streets; they spoiled gaiety, or rather, they drove
it to fevers of license and distraction.” But in the North, 900,000
immigrants were replacing the war dead. Even the South, which had lost a
quarter of its white male population, was full of movement: veterans returning
home, freedmen roaming, Union soldiers on patrol.

It is this mixing of the quick and the dead that is at the heart of Unforgiven—a
funeral cortege and eulogy for the Western and by extension, the West, that
is unafraid to show its subject for what it is. Unforgiven is a
Western that rebukes Westerns—not only their glibness, but their moral
simplicity, their glossing over of history, their shallowness and embrace
of easy killing and violence as solution. William Munny may very well threaten
the townspeople of Big Whiskey with fire and death if they don’t take
down Ned’s
corpse from its humiliating public display, but his real-life counterpart
Eastwood is doing just the same thing; only with an idea, not a man. If Unforgiven does an especially good job of both celebrating and castigating the West
and the Western, if it displays its wares too well, if it takes a dour page
from Buffalo Bill—or if we find this practice too odd, we might take
counsel from the example English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who thought
all corpses should be flayed, then publicly displayed (and whose mummified
corpse is on display at the University College, London); who, in his own
will, asked his executor, Dr. Smith, to

. . . take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate
measures for the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily
frame . . . The skeleton he will cause to be put together in such a manner
as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me
when living . . . The body so clothed . . . he will take charge of and
for containing the whole apparatus he will cause to be prepared an appropriate
box or case . . . my executor will from time to time cause to be conveyed
to the room in which they meet the said box or case with the contents therein
to be stationed in such part of the room as to the assembled company shall
seem meet.

“There was nothing on the stone to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her
only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously
vicious and intemperate disposition.” So the epilogue of Unforgiven tells us. To watch this movie is to also visit a grave, and see that Eastwood
has taken Bentham’s advice. We, too, have had a strange romance. :::

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is a journalist
living in West Texas. His latest work, a mephitic festschrift entitled “To
Anacreon, In Heaven,” will likely see the publication before the terminus
of the 13th b’ak’tun, Mayan calendar. And well he knows that
all of us have it comin’.